Palin has also become conversant on the subject of quantitative easing, the inflationary effects of which she illustrated with a personal anecdote. “I was ticked off at Todd yesterday,” she said. “He walks into a gas station as we’re driving over from Minnesota. He buys a Slim Jim—we’re always eating that jerky stuff—for $2.69. I said, ‘Todd, those used to be 99 cents, just recently!’ And he says, ‘Man, the dollar’s worth nothing anymore.' A jug of milk and a loaf of bread and a dozen eggs—every time I walk into that grocery store, a couple of pennies more...”

So does she understand quantitative easing or not? There's no answer. The anecdote is about inflation, which we all understand, and it's put in that paragraph as if it reflects her comprehension of the much more difficult concept, about which Newsweek provides zero information.

I wonder if people will remember that when they show up to vote for Obama again? Let's see, unemployment is high, everything costs more, we are about to eat hamburger helper without the hamburger, the administration czar/minions are running amok, ATM's cost jobs, and the list goes on.

Obama's white house staff are clueless and Obama is floundering in a situation of their own making. Is he having second thoughts about community organizing writ large on the national and world stage?

The anecdote is about inflation, which we all understand, and it's put in that paragraph as if it reflects her comprehension of the much more difficult concept, about which Newsweek provides zero information.

"Quantative easing" = newspeak for "deliberate inflation."

That's what Sarah Palin is saying. And she's right. She clearly understands precisely what quantatative easing is. And it's an easy concept for every American who buys bread and Slim Jims to understand.

Average Americans are being stolen from by the Federal Reserve, which is deliberately devaluing our currency and giving the printed dollars to billionaire bankers, for no interest.

That's a simple concept ... expressed in terms of the price of Slim Jims.

Anyone should be able to understand it, except apparently, rich government officials who have $170,000/year jobs producing worthless lawyers and having pancakes delivered to them on a regular basis.

The cover photo was iffy, but most of the article, and I read it before your post, was generally neutral and sometimes even nice. It had some very subtle snideness, but it was better than I would have expected from Newsweek.

That is another example of why I cancelled my subscription to Newsweek two years ago after I had be a subscriber since my freshman year in college 36 years ago. I looked at a copy of Newsweek while waiting for a doctor's appointment last week and noticed that they now pick on Bachman the same way that they have been picking on Palin.

nevadabob - that's not newspeak, that's financial geek speak (which came out of England) for PRINT MASS QUANTITIES OF MONEY. (Also a misnomer, since printed money is less than 5% of the "money in circulation" - which is mostly just numbers in bank computers.)

So we're going to create mass quantities of extra money out of thin air, give it to the banks basically for free, and then be surprised when it does cause inflation as everyone realizes the value of the money they had in hand went down. Q.E. causes inflation but not directly.

How the whole thing is done is very complex, but the result is easy to understand. Create lots of extra money, oil prices go up as they want the same equivalent value which now takes more actual dollars.

If that extra money is put into circulation in such a way that it get's reused and leveraged multiple times, then it's worth it (such as businesses using it to upgrade equipment). If that extra money is used to fund arts programs, studies of newt reproduction in Africa, and civil rights programs...no leverage, reduced value of the dollar, increased inflation, continued unemployment.

Q.E. 1 and Q.E. 2 were clearly money not only flushed down the toilet, but then clogged the pipes and caused a back up all over the floor.

She STILL looks good. Is that the worst Newsweek can do? Every husband of every progressive Democrat woman would STILL rather do Satah Palin than his progressive Democrat wife. And THAT is one of the top 3 reasons any woman would hate her.

"So we're going to create mass quantities of extra money out of thin air, give it to the banks basically for free, and then be surprised when it does cause inflation ..."

I thought the point of this post was Ann suggesting that Sarah Palin doesn't really understand "quantitative easing" but instead Sarah Palin confuses "quantitative easing" with "inflation."

In reality, I think it is Ann Althouse who doesn't really see that quantitative easing and inflation are exactly the same thing.

The Obama Administration can't really come out and tell Americans how they're deliberately devaluing our currency and giving that money to his Wall Street banker friends in return for their campaign contributions (Goldman Sachs is the second-largest contributor to Barack Obama).

So they've decided to rename the legal term "bribe payoff" to something less transparent: "quantative easing."

That way, Obama doesn't get bumrushed and run out of town on a fucking rail.

Barack Obama is taxing everyone by creating deliberate inflation and giving that money to his rich banker friends in the form of millions and millions in "bonuses." They pay tax on that bonus (kickback) and contribute to his campaign (bribe).

They're just rearranging our alphabet.

Sarah Palin understands how this all translates into a $2.49 Slim Jim that was 99 cents two weeks ago - a simple concept that has apparently escaped our host.

To be fair to the current “Regime” the various QE’s have achieved their goal(s)…INFLATION. Yes, Althouse, that’s the goal…and No, Palin doesn’t miss the mark. HOWEVER, Bernanke and others believe, know, understand that DEFLATION is the harbinger of economic doom! So the various QE’s are DESIGNED to “inflate” money…and to the extent that that was their goal, they have succeeded. When proposed; DEFLATION was a spectre, haunting the Global Economy-was it as great a spectre as Communism, who knows?- but the Fed feared it and so introduced the QE’s…in part to inflate the dollar. It had other purposes, too or like any “good” piece of Public Policy it achieved several aims at once…

The cover photo reminds me of something I find quirky. In the last few years--well, since I've been on Facebook--I've noticed that young girls pose for camera shots by placing their hands on their waist and twisting their hips slightly.

It's a posture that is quasi-come-hither and quasi-confident. Nearly every photo I now see of a twenty-something has a shot like this.

It's like the "photo face" Althouse blogged about a couple of days ago, but it's a "photo body."

And here, Sarah Palin strikes that pose on the cover of Newseek.

She must be on Facebook a lot, or her daughters have her well tuned into what's "now."

Your blog picture is unflattering....no, it's downright disturbing. I'm thinking of the melting Nazi's at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark".

I have LOVED that photo from the day it was taken (which was over 20 years ago) precisely because it gives some folks the willies. It was from the first professional photo shoot I'd ever done and, being San Francisco, this woman had me doing all these gay-themed things, which I went along with - it was my first shoot - but then I said "Fuck THIS" and got my groove on and voila! The iconic Crack Emcee photo was born.

Some AP photographer confessed that he wasted years of his life trying to take a photo of Reagan that made him look old, vulnerable, and confused. He could never succeed. People don't become movie stars because they photograph poorly.....There's a current of energy that runs through Sarah Palin and that, more than her good looks, attracts the eye. On a crowded stage, she's the one you look at.....I skimmed the Newsweek article. It wasn't particularly informative. The only real news in it was that Newsweek is willing to run an article on Palin that that isn't a hit piece.

Does Newsweek understand quantitative easing? I had to look it up, the old "printing more money" concept (without necessarily printing more money). From what I've heard, quantitative easing can contribute to inflation, but it's not the same thing.

(The Uncredentialed, Crypto Jew)Does Newsweek understand quantitative easing? I had to look it up, the old "printing more money" concept (without necessarily printing more money). From what I've heard, quantitative easing can contribute to inflation, but it's not the same thing

Keynesianism - the economic theory that holds that throwing good money after bad is wise economic policy if only practiced on a wide enough scale.

The only surprising thing about the article was that the journalist let the cat out of the bag. QE is the willful creation of inflation. The average voter is not supposed to know that. They are supposed to think that QE is some arcane field the likes of which no mere mortal can understand.

My most vivid memories of my college economics classes were that the professor did not even know what a derivative or an integral was in mathematics and here he was claiming to know how to describe an entire economy. If you come from an engineering background then it is hard to take a field like economics seriously. There is no rigor and it is all guesswork. There are good reasons for that but they should be wise enough to understand just how little they truly understand.

Being immersed in deep water with weights on your ankles causes drowning. Is it the water or the weights?

WHO GIVES A F*@K what the intellectual cause of the result is. We are just as dead. Sitting around and parsing words and navel gazing isn't helping us.

Maybe it is time to try something different. Like ....take off the weights (government) or get the hell out of the deep end of the pool. Doing the same thing over and over (throwing money down the stimulus black hole) and expecting a new result = insanity.

I’m afraid Dust Bunny that I am going to have to label you a “mean-spirited, Republican Extremist, a bigot, sexist, and homophobe, who support rich corporate jet owners over the poor, womyn, gays, lesbians, the transgendered, People of Colour, the sick, the old, the young, and the hard-working Middle Class Families of America.”

I believe Althouse, the law professor is illustrating "Newsweek's subtle approach to undermining Palin."

Newsweek talks about QE. Quotes Palin talking about inflation. Leaves the implication hanging out there that she can't tell the difference.

In fact, they are two things, but related. "Quantitative easing" is big word talk for more dollars - "quantity" - going after the same pile of economy. "Inflation" is a statement about a measure of price (generally) - it means they are going up.

If you want to feed the trolls, I mean the media, you say the one, quote Palin talking about the practical impact in terms of the other, and voila, she's an idiot.

This is a kind of rhetoric sometimes used in law, and one I would expect a law professor to notice and point out in the classroom.

I believe Althouse, the law professor is illustrating "Newsweek's subtle approach to undermining Palin."

Right, I think the implication (by Newsweek) is that Palin just knows the folksy price of milk and bread stories and maybe doesn’t understand that there are other reasons for inflation. QE is part of it, but not necessarily all.

I suspect she talked about it in more detail and that's the part that got included.

I would agree that QE is not inflation, but rather, is likely to cause inflation.

The amazing thing to me is that the Fed seemed to discover late in the Carter Administration that "printing" money led to inflation - something that the better monetary economists had been telling them for years. And, they stopped printing so much of it during Carter's last year. But that was too late to save Carter from the Reagan Revolution, since part of inflation is expectational, and that takes awhile to work through the system. The Misery Index was still much to high for him to have won.

There is a saying that Money is a Veil. This ties in to the theory of relativity a bit, in that everything is relative, at least in the real economy, in the long run (and a lot shorter "long run" than Keynes was talking about being dead for).

Maybe one way of looking at this is the tautology that MV=PQ, where M=Money Supply, V=Velocity of Money, P=Price Level, and Q=Quantity of Goods and Services. V and Q typically don't move that quickly. That means that if M increases a lot, so does P, which results in inflation.

So, QE1 and QE2 resulted in a lot of new money entering the system, and not a lot of inflation (yet). What gives? Or gave? My guess is that velocity crashed, through the banking crisis, etc. Velocity has slowly increased though the years due to efficiencies in our banking system, etc. But, the one thing that will surely make it increase is inflation, or the worry about it, since the more inflation there is, the quicker everyone wants to get rid of their depreciating money and trade such for goods that are going up in value.

One of my worries is that the Obama Administration is pushing the Fed to inflate our currency in order to reduce the value of their trillion plus dollar deficit and our looming borrowing problems.

I should also note that inflating the currency has a small, short term, stimulative effect. All that extra money makes everyone feel a bit richer, for a short time, before they realize that they really aren't, they just have more money. The problem is that inflation is like an opiad. You need ever higher levels in order to get the stimulative effects, and the effects wear off fairly quickly, and more quickly as time goes on. The other side is also true, that deflation tends to have a mild short term anti-stimulative effect, which is something that no one wants in the midst of a major recession, and may be part of why the Fed has been printing money like crazy.

In any case, we are seeing mild inflation right now, esp. as to things like food (which is also being driven up by the government pushing us to turn corn into Ethanol). And, Palin was not wrong tying the rising costs Todd is facing in the store to QE1 and QE2.

And, maybe this will be another of Palin's teaching moments where everyone jumps on her, and she turns out to be right, as she almost always is.

wv: tosequis - is this 1 1/2 Dos Equis? Not sure, but too early for me to start drinking.

Right, I think the implication (by Newsweek) is that Palin just knows the folksy price of milk and bread stories and maybe doesn’t understand that there are other reasons for inflation. QE is part of it, but not necessarily all.

I think that depends on your point of view. Absent the Fed "printing" a bunch of money, we would likely have had had deflation. And, as pointed out above, QE1 and QE2 involved "printing" a bunch of money.

On the other hand, from another point of view, the Obama Administration has been driving up certain parts of the overall price level by their bone-headed economic policies. Turning corn into ethanol at the levels we are seeing is sure to drive up the price of food (around the world). So, yes, people are going to bed hungry these days, esp. in poorer countries, so that AlGore can sleep better as we do our part to combat AGW (except, of course, it doesn't).

But my response to that ties into why the economists at the Fed throughout the 1970s were causing, not combating inflation, by using interest rate targets. The U.S. economy is a somewhat closed system. Not as closed as it used to be, but still closed enough to cause trouble here.

One of the first things that you learn about economics is Supply and Demand, and that the more of something there is, the less you can charge, etc. But at a more macro level, when the cost of food goes up, money that was being spent elsewhere gets spent on food. And those other markets see a lessened demand, and therefore, ultimately, prices. And, yes, what ties these markets together is money.

The problem for Newsweek is that, in the end, they look foolish, because while there may be other things that affect price levels, Palin was not wrong. Quantitative Easing has helped cause the price of food to go up. Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, and the too much money comes from the QE.

The cover photo was by a woman, interestingly. The rest in the series (at the Daily Beast) were even worse. No sympathy with Palin, who seems to have gamely trying poses that weren't working. The photographer, Emily Shur, has a post at her blog about being in Alaska, very ill at ease. "I’ll never understand people who hunt," etc. Clinging to the idea of prettiness & everything arranged nicely. She spends her free time at the conservation center to enjoy the "lovely, quiet animals."

It's funny how photographers create the subject. The Runner's World photographs were by a man. In addition to making Palin sexier in a more practical style (no bulbous tits), she seems humorous & more interesting. The Newsweek ditz is a young liberal woman with a great fear of wildness, and knowing she's failing during the photo shoot, goes for gross effects she imagines will appeal to men. Feminism in action!! Palin still comes off great.

That prices are going up may mean just that hard times are coming and prices are going up.When the government jumps in and tries to stave off the hard times by printing more money and passing it ut to you so that you can stay ahead of the price rises - that's inflation.

The trouble is that unless the economy quickly catches up and stabilizes, prices and money printing soon goes asymptotic, and the financial system crashes worse than it would have done without the "quantitive easing."

And these guys really have no idea any more than you do of what actually makes the economy go up and down.

traditionalguy said...Alex...What made McCain pick Sarah Palin 3 years ago from among all of the other wannabes now running for President?

Could it have been her immense star power?========================NO, it was his staff threatening to resign enmass if he announced before the Convention he was going through with his obstinant idea that his dear friend, "Good Old Joe Lieberman!" was to be his VP. While a liberal Dem on 95% of issues - he was a Neocon - and McCain loved that.

When the old fool realized his staff was serious about his Dear Friend Lieberman, and laughed off his dear friend "those who oppose Amnesty are Racist!" Lindsey Graham...he did some rushed interviews, though he skipped talking to the others that were in the Primary process. He called in Palin and qualifications aside...loved her potential "red meat" appeal to the rubes, Fundies, and Israel 1st - Christian Zionists.And she thrilled them while alienating most others.The rest of his confused, angry, incoherent campaign, as they say,

Meh. Personally I could use some qualitative easing and a snip of beef jerky might just fit the bill. Anyway, as per The Prez, I needn't worry about such esoteric things and "shouldn't" because he gets paid to worry about all that stuff and I don't. So why should I?

It seems as if every time Newsweek or Time or whoever puts a photo of Sarah Palin on the cover, people will say it's unflattering. Yet the photos—the current one, this one, and this one—all look pretty good to me. So what's the problem? Is it that she isn't airbrushed, as we have come to expect such photos will be, and that they therefore reveal pores, foundation, a little facial hair, and the odd blemish?

I can buy that those were done with the intent of presenting Palin as unattractive, which I take to be the sum and substance of the "unflattering" argument. And that is a problem of sorts, but the problem is the intent not the effect. But what is the effect? Whatever the intent, the pictures present Palin as a very attractive woman in her forties who obviously takes good care of her skin, wears makeup, and doesn't wax. I don't know about flattering, because having never met her I lack the requisite basis for comparison, but these pictures look good. And how strange that any feminist would think it unflattering to portray a woman as she actually is.

In other words, if it is true that the liberal media is seeking to present Palin as unattractive, or at least to minimize her attractiveness, then the manner in which they are doing so tells us—by the miracle of revealed preference—that they presuppose precisely the distorted model of beauty that feminism has criticized over the years. That is to say, one can only think—a fortiori argue—that it's unflattering to present Palin as she is if one presupposes the ideal is the complexion of of prepubescent girl rather than a grown woman.

Great. I couldn't help loving this site and its wide ranging items of interest by the author.As a Palin supporter, it pains me to go to these different places to find her good name smeared and her reputation impugned mindlessly.--As a Palin supporter, it has pained me so much to read the likes of Newsweek over the three years, that I am just grateful this article and its cover turned out as it did.--We are even hoping that it heralds a turning point in the attitude of the "LSM", led by the commercial value of the Sarah stardom, backed by the strength of the Undefeated?

If you come from an engineering background then it is hard to take a field like economics seriously. There is no rigor and it is all guesswork. There are good reasons for that but they should be wise enough to understand just how little they truly understand.

This. I studied Chemical Engineering, took math for math majors and worked supporting labs doing actual hard science research. These people couldn't think their way out of a paper bag of 100's.

Expanding on "poorly understood subcultures" which is what this is really about, Palin has always had a familiar look to me. I grew up rural, where there's a deep tradition of family / farm / homestead as a going concern. The women, of all ages, in this subculture work with their hands and their brains - always have. Similarly, work in the home, around the home and outside the home is all the same. Time at a plant that brings home a check goes into the pot, as does hunting for the larder, harvesting from a garden or blueberries in season, or doing some laundry. There's no distinction between "men's work" and "women's work" beyond who's better at what, and who can we better afford to risk.

These woman are perfectly comfortable in their bodies, as instruments of work, and of fun. They don't need any "slut walk" to take control of their sexuality, or whatever. Indeed, suggest such a thing and you would be lucky if they *only* smack you. If you're really lucky, however, one of them might dress up for you.

Many of the folks who don't "get" Palin - agree with her or not - are interpreting her behavior from the wrong frame of reference; from the wrong subculture.

Engineers, similarly, look at things from a very different frame of reference. To be considered, they will look for a very different grounding in fact, and command of the tools compared to, say, sometime economists who write for the NYT. The squishy notion that you kind of understand something is in an engineering culture the one thing most guarded against. Indeed, the taboos of engineering culture *require* you to be skeptical, especially of your own, attractive notions.

It's too bad that since the "cultural anthropologists" hijacked the field from the "field anthropologists" you can't get actual observations of a culture that operates differently. That's a powerful, powerful tool, to be able to get inside the mind and models of the other. Unfortunately, to do so, you gotta let go of the story you've already decided to tell, and that we can never have.